LABYRINTH OF TOUHOU - GENSOKYO AND THE HEAVEN-PIERCING TREE

Labyrinth of Touhou 2 is a dungeon crawler that is both complex and challenging while also being incredibly generous and full of features that facilitate a good amount of player expression. This does come with the caveat that a wiki dive will be in order to better understand the mechanics and how the game's various systems work as well as how to recruit the more hidden characters and how various spell card attack formulas function. Once you've settled in after 4 or 5 floors and get some team building and tough boss fights under your belt however, learning to put teams together and better build characters for certain situations starts to become its own little puzzle. The game facilitates this by letting you respec your characters' skillsets at any time (and you can respec/refund purchased stat boosts at any time with consumabale items as well). While this level of customization and constant retooling may sound like the game being over-tuned for specific setups, that couldn't be further from the truth. Team composition can be very dynamic and it's very possible to play with your favorites or sample a bit of everything so long as you're willing to put in the time to swap stats, skills, and gear around to accommodate everyones' strengths and weaknesses. Having played the game through three times as this point, I'm yet to find a team I was 100% dissatisfied with or I wasn't able to get going. Simply put, Labyrinth of Touhou - Gensokyo and the Heaven-Piercing Tree is a satisfying dungeon crawl that encourages experimenting and playing with builds and gives you lots of difficult encounters to throw the results of that experimentation at and it's a game I've enjoyed returning to for years now.

lostword refugee here; i love not gambling to have a viable cirno

The scarlet sisters are in this game and as such it is good.

DRPG that made the genre brilliant. Unlike most DRPGs, this one very much stands out by telling you to assemble a 12-unit party (more like a small army) and then expecting to make full use of its strengths while covering its weaknesses in its backline-frontline + ATB based combat. One of the most mechanically unique RPGs I've had pleasure of playing, from many options of customising your party between dives to challenging, almost puzzle-like boss battles sometimes requiring you to use your party members in unorthodox ways. Suffers a bit from description clarity just like other games in the same genre, nothing that cannot be handled with a bit of wiki diving though, the wikis for this game are very clear and complete in both Japanese and English. Highly recommended to check out, and especially so with an even richer spiritual sequel on the horizon.

I REALLY wanted to like this game but...it's just not good. [h1] TLDR Bullet point list [/h1] [b] Pros: [/b] [list] [*]Large roster of unique characters. [*]Fun movesets for those characters. [/list] [b] Cons: [/b] [list] [*]Bosses/Enemies are horribly designed. [*]Basically force you to play specific ways with the characters THEY want you to use. [*]Music is...not great. [*]HOLY GRINDFEST. 7+ hours of grinding just for one character to be useable. [*]Terrible character unlock conditions that conflict most of the time with the gameplay they try to push. [*]Money (used for stat boosts) has no good way to be grinded. [*]Basically have to have a wiki open at all times due to how obscure some things are, and how BS bosses are. [*]Not the worst thing, but TP is purely a nuisance and a horrible mechanic. [/list] Score: 2/10 [h1] THE WHOLE REVIEW [/h1] In theory a touhou RPG where you get to build up your favorite characters as whatever class you want basically sounds INCREDIBLE, but in practice this game falls short of every other game out there. It's bogged down by abysmal boss/enemy design that forces you to use the characters they want to to use, wanting you to grind money for hours on end to get them to a point you CAN use them, and even then it can still come down to pure RNG if you win half the time. To top it off? several events and character unlocks require other characters being used enough in battle (which you get no hint at, you just have to guess or look up the wiki when you hit a event that nothing happens in.) and one of the character unlocks requires a OBSCENE amount of money (the thing that they very clearly want you using on stat boosts instead.) The music is also EXTREMELY grating on the ears (most aren't even looped at all) and at one point I just turned it off and put on my own music in the background. It's a real disappointment considering Touhou has so much amazing music, so how did the music here end up so bad??? While the characters themselves all get very fun movesets to use in combat, it doesn't make up for the fact you can't use most of them cause the bosses force you to use specific characters or you just die. On the topic of those bosses, after floor 7 they become so bad i took a several year long break before coming back to give this game a second chance but...they only get worse as you continue, I started to DREAD every single boss icon I saw cause i knew it meant another several hours of grinding for stats to boost up more characters that i didn't want to use but am now being forced to because the bosses are so terribly designed. HP Sponges, Instant death if you don't kill the boss in a few turns, one shotting characters if you so much as THINK of buffing up. My "favorite" is when even after maximum debuffing the boss and max buff my attack i still do 0 to 2 damage with most characters cause they want you constantly dumping money into stats. This also all applies to just NORMAL enemies after floor 9. I WISH i could enjoyed this game and recommend it, but i just can't. I gave the best shot i could but floor 14 was the last straw for me, i don't wanna sit here for another 7+ hours grinding money for two more characters to beat a single boss. I tried to complete the game, I really did, but I just can't sit here for so long just to instantly hit another hardwall 30 mins later after ALREADY grinding for so long. Also, another thing is, all characters have a TP stat, when it runs out they are forced back home. This makes grinding EVEN MORE of a annoyance as you can't even get a high money bonus from consecutive battles before your money makers that increase money output get kicked out of the dungeon and you have to leave and lose the current bonus you have built up. There are many other Touhou RPGs that are much more fun and well made, I recommend playing those instead over this mess. If someone made a rebalance mod for this game that fixed the horrible design then MAYBE I could say to give this a shot, but even then it shouldn't take a whole rebalance to make a game enjoyable.

How am I supposed to walk through life when I can now recognise these people in that one music video?

Hardest game I've EVER played, but can't put it down, HATE and LOVE this game!

If you're opposed to playing with a wiki pulled up while you play, don't buy this. Otherwise, it's a great DRPG. It's big strengths are in the top tier party building/customization and boss fights. I've recruited about 30 characters, and they all feel genuinely different. This just doesn't happen in games. While the random enemies are typical DRPG boring trash fights, the boss fights are numerous and as varied as the party members. So many items are available to customize loadouts as well, and you will absolutely want to change out equipment for certain fights. I've been playing on Hard, and the boss fights have been well balanced and satisfying to defeat. I've never been forced to grind yet, which is a big plus that I normally hate in DRPGs. Neutral side: the dialogue is OKish. Definitely amateur writing. I've seen worse, but I'm not compelled by the cast/story. I don't care about Touhou at all, so if you do, it might hit different. That said, it's easy to skip through, so it's no biggie. Other big flaws: recruiting certain characters is simply a chore and required for the postgame. And you can't see boss stats until after killing them...which is not helpful. These are the 2 biggest reasons to have the wiki pulled up (though that doesn't fix all the annoyances - like requiring certain characters to be in the party for prolonged use). The dungeons deeper in are a little too long/boring between bosses (which are the main attraction).

While I do not recommend this game, it does not reflect my personal experience or enjoyment, just my objective opinion. The good : - good songs - great art - lots of hours of gameplay - not much OOC in character interactions. The bad : - WAY too much grind, to a point it's just not enjoyable, even to people who love this type of game. - Hard mode is straight up impossible if you don't know the game like the back of your hand, which reveals a badly balanced difficulty variation, with random encounters being far too easy compared to the bosses who often feel impossible before being way overleveled. - lack of variety, a lot of characters become irrelevant because a better version of them is introduced later on - lack of commitment. Builds feel inconsequential as the "correct" way to beat the game is rebuild your whole party from scratch, replacing learnt skills with new ones (for free because they knew their game was poorly balanced) and equipement EVERY SINGLE BOSSFIGHT. Giving you no attatchment to the builds you make or characters you train, since you'll have to swap everything in the next bossfight. Frankly, this game isn't bad, but it's a goldmine of untaped potential and wasted opportunities due to poor game balancing, which is unfortunately crucial on those type of game where gameplay is redondant. Honestly, not worth it's rather high pricing for a fangame, and definitely not worth it if you aren't a fan of slow progression and grinding this type of game brings. 5/10

メインストーリーまでクリア。 キャラが無尽蔵に強化できるのでRPGのレベル上げ作業が好きな人にはぎりぎりおすすめ。 簡素なマップのビジュアルに加え、後半のダンジョンのギミックが面白さに結びついていないストレス要素ばかりで探索は正直苦痛でしかない。